Quote Originally Posted by ForteNightshade View Post
The irony is they lack this same fear when it comes to Machinist. It really does go to show how completely out-of-sync the dev team seems to be at times.
I think they had that fear on some level, but Stormblood Machinist was so mechanically broken and unpleasant to play that it probably would have been harder to make anything of it that people would like than it would be to rebuild it. Even if they'd failed to make it as popular as it is, they'd have been hard pressed to make something worse, and even then they at least made a good faith effort of cleaning up their mess.

They are definitely out of touch with the Monk playerbase, you don't need to look much further than how proud they were of Shadowbringers Monk compared to how poorly it was received on Launch, or indeed how its currently the least played job in all content other than Ultimate, which is prone to sampling bias because it caters to such a small population of the playerbase. There was almost a glimpse that they might have gotten a clue in 5.05, but 5.1 just making Anatman a new addition to our gigantic useless action pile cinched it. They might make us eat our words in the next live letter and bring sweeping changes to Monk and make Anatman have a use, fix the fist stances, and even make Tornado Kick be something we use, but I wouldn't count on it. It'll probably be nothing again and we'll be left to rot till the next expansion as usual.